Reviews
Veronica Lee
There’s little chance, I would guess, that the Windsors were gathered on the sofa to watch The Windsors last night. The show, thankfully, is not another attempt to oil up the collective fundament of the British royal family (and goodness knows television producers were doing enough of that in programmes about the Queen’s 90th birthday recently), more an attempt to destroy it by spoof.Royalists needn’t worry about the imminent downfall of their favourites, though; as funny as much of The Windsors is, there’s nothing much to challenge the crown in George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore’s scripts. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Appearing before theatres full of middle-aged women in just your underpants is certainly one way to throw a retirement party. It may not be everybody's choice, but then Carlos Acosta is not like everybody, and never has been.For me, what marks Acosta out isn't biography, though his journey from Cuba to the top tiers of Western ballet was unusual, nor is it talent, though he has it in spades. It's generosity. All top performers are givers to some extent, but Acosta on stage has the warmth of the natural empath, appearing to love the audience for loving him. That, surely, is why he has become a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Dandyism.”For this crime against cinema, Gomes (pictured center, below), his sound man (boom in hand), and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s something endlessly fascinating about T E Lawrence. In popular culture, he has been immortalised by Peter O’Toole’s dazzlingly blue-eyed performance in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but is there more to this English eccentric than freedom fighting on the side of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks? Howard Brenton certainly thinks so, and his portrait of this strange, curiously unworldly and painfully conflicted character is, like its hero, full of great potential, much of which it fails to realise.It’s 1923, and Lawrence has returned from the Middle East, now a national hero Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Can it be true? Was this really the CBSO’s first performance of Bax’s The Garden of Fand? OK, Bax is hardly mainstream repertoire, and if Oramo or Rattle had conducted it, someone would have remembered. Further back in the orchestra’s 96-year history, though, surely Adrian Boult or George Weldon must have been tempted? The records are vague. The enterprising Michael Seal conducted it in a pre-concert slot with a student orchestra a couple of years back, but the performance with which John Wilson opened this concert was the first time the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has indulged in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)Inevitably there's the question of whether anyone needs another modern-instrument cycle of Beethoven symphonies. If the answer's yes, Paavo Järvi's set with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie is my current favourite, but it's only available on expensive single discs. Sir Simon Rattle's unspectacular Vienna Philharmonic cycle is now available at budget price, but this new Berlin set is better in every respect. It will improve the life of anyone who spends the time exploring it. The playing is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss. Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In this 400th anniversary year, amid what feels like 400 million shows and tributes, it’s increasingly difficult for a Shakespeare production to stand out. No such problem for Emma Rice’s opening salvo, which responds to those critical of her appointment in resolute fashion. Never thought you’d see fireman’s poles, amplification, Indian sitar and disco lights at the Globe? Think again.Rice’s Dream honours the spirit of the building without feeling bound by its period-perfect architecture. Rather than Athens, we are in the here and now, with Hippolyta a leopard print-clad Russian bride, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sometimes compared to Boardwalk Empire or The Wire, and raved over by the likes of Brad Pitt, Snoop Dogg and even Jose Mourinho, Peaky Blinders opened its third series by becoming positively Godfather-esque. Writer Steven Knight whisked us away from the satanic mills of Birmingham to Tommy Shelby's sprawling Warwickshire mansion, where the Peakies supremo was trying to celebrate his unexpected wedding to Grace.It was a fraught gathering of clans, set in a tenebrous anti-Downton. The extended Shelby brood, which teems with brothers and cousins and aunts like dynastic knotweed, is never more Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Any drama in which a crazed crone stares silently at an urn containing the ashes of her murdered husband is not afraid of raising Shakespeare’s ghost. It doesn’t matter that Gunnar was a philanderer who foolishly went sailing with his lover’s husband – his widow still grieves for him even though he died at the end of the last century. Having scattered his ashes in the sea, Mildred the Mad (Johanna Ringbom) immediately ties herself to an anchor and goes overboard. Her companion in the boat, Jonna, who as a child witnessed her father kill Gunnar, once again does nothing.Ten weeks ago Thicker Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In which two of the biggest beasts of Brazilian music played in tandem (and it was often playful) sparred with each other and revealed despite being rivals, how close they have been and remain. The equivalent might be something like the Sting/Paul Simon duet concert, the difference being that these two have known each other for half a century and were architects of the late sixties Tropicalia movement in Brazil, a musical revolution where, as Wordsworth might have said at the time “bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”. The duo and others brought global pop, avant- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.But as written and directed by Marc Abraham and broodingly shot by the great cameraman Dante Spinotti (LA Confidential, The Last of the Mohicans), the film wears Williams’s unlikeability like some perverse badge of honour, and even Hiddleston’s natural warmth can’t cosy the audience up Read more ...